Having long since abandoned his mission of making science fun in favor of sucking the same out of everything else, perpetual opinion machine Neil deGrasse Tyson delivered another thermally radiant take this weekend, suggesting, mayhap, t’was Sports Ball killed the skycar.

“Sometimes I wonder if we’d have flying cars by now had civilization spent a little less brain energy contemplating Football,” wrote Tyson on Twitter Sunday night.

Ignoring that “civilization brain energy” isn’t a real thing, Tyson has fallen into a familiar trap, implying that serious and frivolous pursuits are somehow mutually exclusive. In reality, of course, the dumb things humans do with their spare time are a frequent source of inspiration.

Of course, Tyson’s tweet is probably more empty provocation than serious critique, but his freshman roommate-level thought experiment poses an interesting question of its own: What secret space drug is this dude smoking?